


Gravel and Glass (the Parable of the Wise Remix)

by cosmogyral



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/F, Gen, Ouroboros Mix Lightning Round, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:12:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogyral/pseuds/cosmogyral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terezi vs. Wisconsin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gravel and Glass (the Parable of the Wise Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Call and Answer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/279845) by [arenoseAnima](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arenoseAnima/pseuds/arenoseAnima). 



> Plaid, it almost killed me not to spill the beans on this in chat and to pretend like I hadn't read the shit out of Call & Answer, over and over again. I hope you enjoy this even a quarter as much as I enjoyed that.

Everywhere you go across the skin of this strange alien country you get asked about her.

They do not know that they're asking about her! They are probably asking about something else, when they ask you where you're headed, if you're looking for a table for two, if you're a Libra, huh? because they are a Scorpio. A _Scorpio._ You like that one. You examine the little pendant they produce with careful, pungent attention, and then you steal it in her honor. It's not hard. As soon as it's on your person it becomes part of the general god-defusing aura you appear to be giving off, to spare their human thinkpans the terror of seeing your true form.

This is not a problem that's going to be coming up for them very often. There are six of you left, and you're not sure if you should count Sollux, who's only half there, or Aradia, who is mostly a God with a distinctly capital letter, or Kanaya, who walks around in the daylight like it isn't no thing. Dave would say "ain't no thing" but you are taking a Dave-free vacation. A Davecation. It is obviously going really well, almost as well as the thing where you have plans to track down your dead sister and shake her until she remembers that she is being stupid and, then--

You haven't decided what happens next.

In your motel rooms at night you sit up and flick through the television channels. You have been reliably informed that nighttime is not a time for law students to travel abroad, especially by foot, but the habits of a lifetime are not so easily swayed and so you are awake when the really _terrible_ shows are on. Human television sounds tinny, even when you seek out their more artistic fiction. All the explosions use the same effects and the screams are often just one man screaming, a replay. They don't hold your interest. On the other hand: there is an entire series of televisual entertainment entitled _Law and Order._

The point is that while law and also order duel themselves out on the television screen, you try to decide within yourself what Vriska would do if you saw her again. Sometimes she lives! Sometimes she turns around and stays with you, and you kiss her the way you did once, just once, when you were both barely even five and a half and you thought the color black was just what Kanaya called A Decorative Element. This scenario, however, is too improbable to hold your attention for long. Usually you would settle for something simpler: Vriska dies, and you know, as the sword goes into her, that she died in justice. Or glory.

You are walking during the daytime, sleepy in the sun, when you finally find yourself a map. It is on the wall of a "diner" which is decorated with "Americana." America, you are pretty sure, is a large part of the world, populated by hollering phallus baboons like the boy you aren't speaking to, and you are not surprised to find that you are in it, but you _are_ surprised by the large map of the feudality of Wisconsin and the capital you passed through, the Green Bay. Not least because it isn't a capital. The largest team of sports in Wisconsin was from there, you are sure of it, and you frown at the map in the hopes that it will change if you squint hard enough and wish. You made this world. Did you make it to have a poor understanding of the importance of athletic prowess and concussions?

You are in a place called "Oshkosh," on the shore of a little lake, much smaller than the Green Bay. There's something to the south and west of you that smells, stronger than anything else in the washed-out mural, and you think at first it must be hamburger grease, but then you kneel and lick the wall and it explodes in you.

There's nothing for it but the numerals of the blind prophet. In the Spring Green, there is something you need to S33.

You take a packed lunch of thirty-four plastic red bombs from the diner and head for where you guess the mobility transports run, a huge river full of more people of any kind than anywhere else in your life before the game. The signs say it's 41, with a curlicue around it, and you consider how you are meant to pronounce it. You sit in the grass by the side of the road and listen to the transports and facilitators speed past. Your nose must still be in prophetic overdrive because you can tell who's slowing for you because they mean trouble and you just blend right into the background for their sake. A transport shoots by you and your head whips round by itself, just in time to catch their open trunk, the feet flopping out of it. "What the _fuck?_ " you say out loud, instead of following them to enact justice, and it makes you feel a little better.

Your whole body is angry at Dave Strider, including the little bones in your ears, but he's right about some things.

Finally someone slows for you who you don't mind slowing, and you climb in. They're sympathetic. They're not going all the way to the Spring Green, but they will take you as far as Madison. You don't know where Madison is, but the wind is still right and you curl up in their backseat tired as your lusus in the shell and you sleep.

You wake up in Madison and eat your packets, and the human who drove you this far, who you discover is male, he sees you and his face is blazoned over with pity and he teaches you about french fries. Normally you would explain to him that you already are in at least two relationships, even if one of them is dead and both are awful, but you are currently developing a new relationship with the potato food. He tells you that it grows in the ground and you actually weep, not an embarrassing amount but enough to season the potatoes with more salt, which turns out to be superfluous but, vitally, _delicious._ You shake out all twenty-six of your surviving plastic red bombs over the fries and drown your face in them.

A student takes you to Mazomanie, and for the first time you find out that the place you S33K is a museum. You have only been to a museum once, just the once, a great abandoned hollowed-out hole that Aradia set a campaign in. You hid under the megaloponera foetens as an opening move-- your class has never been given to direct attacks-- and it wasn't clear to you in the dim shadows where the exhibits ended and the monsters began. When you became a legislacerator you were going to take Pyralspite to the Satellite of Law. You were going to show her the great stuffed head of her predecessor, the one who'd taken Mindfang's arm, and you had nebulous plans to leave with Mindfang's actual cane as a test of what Dave would call your _sweet-talkin jive_.

It takes four hours to walk the rest of the way to Spring Green, but it doesn't matter. You can hear the call as loudly as an actual friend. You follow it one cropfield after another, past the advertising signage, fifteen miles up, until you are confronted with it.

It looks like a hive.

You wander from room to room, trailing your fingers on the exhibits, until you come across something entitled the Heritage of the Sea, and there is your first bounty.

The troll who belonged to it had been in the habit of using other trolls' horns to replace its lusus' teeth, an experience fatal for the lusus, the trolls, and eventually for the perpetrator. Vriska had been so proud, and she'd delivered the carcass of the whale to Eridan with such insouciance. Vriska was never actually any good at insouciance and you could not decide whether or not to exult with her or to pity her so much that your entire vascular system gave up. You had eventually settled on both.

When you were four you were pretty sure you knew how this worked, that if someone did good things they were going to be allowed to live, and if someone committed wickedness, then you were there to bring that home to them. Now you know that someone can do pretty much nothing but wickedness her whole life and you could still be left wondering if she was a hero. Someone can do good after good and barely know he's even doing it and you can lead him to a rocky bed and let him die.

Behind you, there's a swell of red and then the sticky, delicious scent of a Dr. Pepper.

"Hush, coolkid," you say without turning, holding a palm up to him. "I am remembering."


End file.
